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Comment by bbx | Hacker News Reader

Was using Winamp 5 for the past year but recently switched back to v2.95, which is allegedly the best version out there.

Although it's 10 years old (!!), it's still the best music player available: lightweight, fast, responsive, and kept simple.

I had hopes for the Windows 7 Media Player. But it turned out to be a dreadful experience.

  Me: Can't I pause that song by hitting space?  
  WMP: No, there are no keyboard shortcuts!
  Me: I wanna play all the songs of this folder!
  WMP: Ok, but I'll mess up the order! By the way, are you interested in purchasing
  more songs from this artist? Cause I got a VirginMega link just right here!
  Me: No thanks...
  WMP: Why not? I mean, iTunes gets away with it, why can't I?
  Me: I just want to play some music.
  WMP: Really?? JUST that??
  Me: I wish.

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Did you ever try Foobar 2k - its arguably a better replacement for Winamp on windows

I think foobar2000 was created by a (the?) developer who worked on Winamp many years ago, before it was bought.

Yes, Peter Pawlowski. According to Wikipedia, he is "a former freelance contractor for Nullsoft."

EDIT: He's also been working on an audio player called Boom: http://perkele.cc/software/boom

Peter was notable for maintaining a lot of the audio output backends for Winamp. People who had problems with their Creative Labs sound cards (read: basically anyone who owned one) causing playback glitches in Winamp would post about it on the Winamp forums and peter would get really cranky and eventually figure out how to fix it. (:

TheSOB88, you're hellbanned so barely anyone can see your comments.

What's this about? Parent's unsername is not TheSOB88.

You have to enable a setting to see [dead] posts, and you can't reply to them. That's why people post as siblings, hoping that the banned person will come back to the thread and see their name.

HN has an amusingly childish policy of hellbanning individuals it deems inappropriate or otherwise objectionable--hellbanning hides the banned account's comments to everyone unless you set "showdead" to true in your account preferences.

Some users have started kindly informing the hellbanned posters that, for whatever reasons, don't seem to notice that no one ever responds or upvotes their comments.

If I may get on my soapbox (if I wasn't already), I find the whole thing symptomatic of Silicon Valley's culture of networking hell and reputation management. It's a policy of elitism; a policy that disenfranchises in the name of some fictional notion of quality; a policy that demonstrates just how rotten the tech industry is at heart.

Why do I go that far? Because community culture is indicative of so many things. This is the community and atmosphere that pg set up, that pg creates, moderates, and maintains.

pg may not be formally 'responsible,' but he's certainly at the head.

Because I'm an asshole, but not enough of one to get hellbanned (at least on this account), I am in some state of suspension: an artificial delay imposed on every request.

(That's what I don't get about HN's moderation: what, did you think I wouldn't notice that you're essentially trying to herd me like chattel? I stubbornly keep this account kicking out of simple contrariness.)

That's all well and good, but let's take a look at what the trigger was https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5615120 . If you ran a community -- and realistically there's nothing stopping you from doing so -- would you tolerate that kind of nonsense? I know I wouldn't want to hang around there if you did.

You're right (to continue going slightly meta), it's a policy of elitism, but in the same vein as Wikipedia. They too are still around as a result.

Side note: Quality is quantifiable to a degree and is by no means a fictional notion.

If the mountains of downvotes don't do the trick you can ban accounts directly. Hellbanning is cowardly and ineffective.

This isn't Wikipedia, it's a discussion forum--and the discussion pages on Wikipedia are moderated fairly and openly.

I didn't mean that quality as a whole was fictional, I meant that the notion of quality this policy is attempting to enact was fictional/unattainable.

Flame wars still happen. People still complain about the nastiness of HN comments. It's a discussion forum: angry conversation is what it's for.

Hellbanning does absolutely nothing to improve 'quality of discourse,' it just makes this place nastier.

Discussion forums are for discussion. Angry conversation is an emergent property of some discussions, on the net or off, but not the sole response to anything you may disagree with.

My own opinion on hell-banning or any other forms of account "punishment" is that it is, as you say, cowardly and ineffective, as long as the user has no idea that it has occurred. Either inform the user, or completely ban the account. Otherwise you're leaving people screaming into the wind when you could just tell them no-one is listening.

The whole point is that it's not about punishment, it's about preserving the tone.

Telling somebody "you've been banned" will make them upset. Some people get severely offended and they want to fight. So they go and create new accounts and start over, or they seek revenge in other ways. It can be very time consuming to deal with. Granted, this will still happen because some people will realize that they've been hellbanned, but the ones that simply get the impression that people aren't responding to their trolling will get bored with it and go away. Which is a win.

It's to let him know that he triggered hell banning somehow. it's super annoying, because you don't know if you are hell banned.

That's the point of it.

TheSOB88, you've been hell banned for almost half a year by now.

I agree, I've used foobar2000 [1] for over ten years when Winamp (my previous goto music player) started to get all crashy and hangy for no good reason. It's pretty solid, can handle massive playlists and has nice clean and simple UI with no cruft. My only wish is that they did foobar2000 for Android.

[1]: http://www.foobar2000.org/

also nice: http://www.aimp.ru

Does it fade out songs when you pause them?

If so, where can I download it and where can I donate to whoever wrote it?

Yes, preferences > playback > output and select output method DirectSound http://wiki.hydrogenaudio.org/index.php?title=Foobar2000:Pre... http://www.techspot.com/tweaks/foobar/foobar-5_files/image00... ; http://www.foobar2000.org/ ; http://flattr.com/thing/51681/foobar2000-freeware-audio-play...

Agree about Foobar. It's about the only app from Windows that I miss when using OS X.

Anyone have a Mac player they use with similar philosophy/featureset to Foobar?

cog http://cogx.org ; less features IIRC

Heh, I'm listening to the album in their first screenshot. Gotta be a good sign.

WMP is why I bought an iPod. As a Microsft employee at the time, I struggled longer than any mortal should to get WMP to sync music to my 2003-era Windows Phone. I eventually realized that any kind of synchronization and general usefulness in using WMP with a Windows Phone was nothing but marketing lies. So one day I said, "get in the car, honey, we're going to buy iPods."

iPods led to iPhones, which led to iOS development and Macs, to the point that there are no more Windows machines in the house and I haven't done Windows development in about five years.

All kicked off by the fact that MSFT couldn't make a software music player that didn't suck.

Ctrl+P was the shortcut for Pause, if I remember correctly. WMP wasn't that bad, but Foobar fits my needs much better.

For a ten-year old Winamp I'd have my doubts about Unicode support at the very least.

You should check out aimp[1]. It looks and performs like winamp and has similar functionality.

[1] http://www.aimp.ru/

Unfortunately, recently they started messing with the design and the result is much worse than transition from Winamp 5.3x to better versions.

Multiple playlist tabs, though, are great. Fortunately Audacious has them too.

I used Winamp heavily until the version where they added video support. That version was extremely buggy for me and I used the previous version for several years until I found Foobar2000.

It looks like 2.90 was when they added video support:

"added integrated full featured video support (NSV and DirectShow (AVI,ASf,MPEG,etc))" -- http://forums.winamp.com/showthread.php?t=130748

Give AIMP a shot. Same as winamp2 but with built in flac and cue support.

I use Windows 7 WMP every day because the media keys on my laptop only work with that and I have never ever encountered any of those problems you are talking about.

- I can pause/unpause with space.

- The song order remains after I drag in the folder.

- Right after the very first start (i.e. on clean win7), it asks you if you want to see ads of songs of similar artists you listen to.

I have also an old version of winamp because a melomane of my friends told me the transitions between songs was better in old winamp than in recent one.

There's Winamp Lite for you. I don't miss anything from the pre-3 times.

I always preferred 2.89, but that's mostly just me being picky.

You just weren't meant for each other!

The nice thing about old, simple software is that the attack vectors are often known publicly and are easy to work around. In the instance of Winamp, older versions of 2.x have a buffer overflow exploit in the playlist parsing. So.. don't load playlists from untrusted sources, something most people never do anyway.

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